Graph Database Tutorial

The database industry is not used to databases that can generate events. The closest the relational database has to events are stored procedures, but they never “reach out” back to the application, so their usefulness is limited. But events are quite natural for graph databases. Broadly speaking, they occur in two places:

Events on the graph database itself (example: “tell me when a transaction has been committed, regardless on which thread”)

Events on individual objects stored in the graph database (example: “tell me when property X on object Y has changed to value Z”, or “tell me when Node A has a new Edge”)

Events on the GraphDB itself are more useful for administrative and management purposes. For example, an event handler listening to GraphDB events can examine the list of changes that a Transaction is performing at commit time, and collect statistics (for example).

From an application developer’s perspective, events on the data are more interesting:

An example may illustrate this. Imagine an application that helps manage an emergency room in a hospital. The application’s object graph contains things such as the doctors on staff, the patients currently in the emergency room and their status (like “arrived”, “has been triaged”, “waiting for doctor”, “waiting for lab results” etc.) Doctors carry pagers. One of the requirements for application is that the doctor be paged when the status of one of their assigned patients changes (e.g. from “waiting for lab results” to “waiting for doctor”).

With a passive database, i.e. one that cannot generate events, like a typical relational database, we usually have to write some kind of background task (e.g. a cron job) that periodically checks whether certain properties have changed, and then sends the message to the pager. That is very messy: e.g. how does your cron job know which properties *changed* from one run to the next? Or we have to add the message sending code to every single screen and web service interface in the app that could possibly change the relevant property, which is just as messy and hard to maintain.

With a GraphDB like InfoGrid, you simply subscribe to events, like this: